Zimmi has bulging, expressive eyes, a cutesy little giggle, and he farts in nine different ways. If you tickle Zimmi’s nose, he’ll sneeze; if you feed him a chili pepper, he’ll turn red in the face; and if you flip him up and down a few times, he’ll throw up all over the screen. It’s up to you to wipe off the vomit with your finger.

Zimmi, a kids’ app-toy that lives on an iPhone and in a plush, is the creation of Sydney’s Bigfoot Toys, a small company that has been in the toy-inventing business for 13 years. Zimmi represents Bigfoot’s first foray into apps. It’s also the first time the company has attempted to bring its own product to market, having traditionally designed and licensed its toys to other parties.

Bigfoot has invested more than $500,000 on the Zimmiz line, getting TV-quality animation done for the app in Thailand, a process that has taken a year and a half. The lively software contains more than 330 animations, amounting to more than 30 minutes running time of different reactions, expressions, and digital emissions. You can even play games with Zimmi, such as “Hide & Seek” and “Hide & Holler,” in which you use your voice to summons the character out from his hiding place.

The business model for the toy, which is targeted at 3-6-year-olds, is pretty simple. When you download the free app, you can customize your Zimmi so he or she looks and sounds just like you want. But then the character is set in place. If you want to customize the character later – change his skin color, perhaps, or give him a grill – then you have to pay up for the premium version, which is 99 cents. That gets you an infinite number of character changes. If you’re serious about your Zimmi, you can spend $25 on the plush toy, which has an open slot so you can slide your phone and the app serves as the face. That’s why Bigfoot calls these things “phone faces” (or, to be more trademark specific, “fonefaces”).

So far the Zimmi is available online, and in some Australian stores, most prominently the Harvey Norman chain. It has been on sale since October, and the app has registered 2,000 downloads.

Bigfoot CEO Spiro Dimitriou says the company is about to embark on a TV ad campaign to ginny up sales, but the overall international indicators for app toys are not that great. Despite a number of players in the global market, including Applingz, Moshi Monsters, and Woogie, app toy sales have been disappointing. “We’re all scratching our heads a bit,” Dimitriou concedes, although he thinks it’s just a matter of time before consumers embrace app toys. After all, they’re still pretty new.

Perhaps one of the factors holding app-toys from taking off is that there are not many 4-year-olds that are rocking iPhones. Dimitriou expresses hope, however, that parents’ hand-me-down phones will help get the market going.

Check out Dimitriou exhibiting one of his colorful friend’s messy eating habits.

Facebook has introduced Scrapbook, a new feature that allows parents to share and collect images of their children in one place without requiring them to worry about tagging their kids’ face with each other’s names just to make sure they don’t miss what the other person has posted. [Source: Facebook]

“For all the clumsy rhetorical lip service [former Yahoo News head] Guy Vidra pays to The New Republic’s hallowed intellectual traditions, this is what his vision of a nimble digital news product finally translates into: a vaguely journalistic veneer strategically designed to conceal a rancid interior of ‘elevated’ advertising.”

Indian e-commerce company Flipkart is said to be raising $600 million in its latest bid to compete with Amazon. The company is also said to have garnered a higher valuation with this funding round — quite the feat, considering it was previously valued at around $11.5 billion. [Source: The Economic Times]

Here comes another unicorn: Sprinklr, a New York-based marketing company, has raised $46 million at a $1.17 billion valuation. The funds will be used to help the 700-person company expand its marketing platform. [Source: Fortune]

Curator, the tool Twitter created so the media could find and share tweets with its audience, is now available to the public. Because if there’s anything people wanted to see more of, it’s tweets randomly inserted into blog posts, television spots, and other forms of media. [Source: TechCrunch]

A court in France has decided not to ban Uber’s low-cost services until the country’s highest appeals court, or its supreme court, weigh in on the constitutionality of a new transport law. [Source: The Wall Street Journal]

Tinder is refocusing on its spam-fighting efforts in the wake of reports that movie studios are using the service to promote their movies, scammers are attempting to steal information via the app, and pranksters have created tools that trick heterosexual men into flirting with each other. [Source: The Verge]

Uber offers drivers whose accounts have been deactivated a choice: attend a class that requires them to pass an exam, or take a class that doesn’t. The latter has been informed by Uber employees, and the company has sent thousands of drivers to it, according to a report from BuzzFeed. Why is that a problem? Because Uber isn’t supposed to provide its drivers with formal training; doing so makes them bona fide employees, not independent contractors. [Source: BuzzFeed]

Flipboard users will now be able to collect articles and share them via private magazines visible only to members of certain groups. The feature is aimed at students working in the same class, companies sharing press coverage, and other groups that might want an easy way to share Web pages with each other without having to use public tools like Facebook or Twitter. [Source: Flipboard]

T-Mobile has tasked its customers with creating a real-world coverage map that makes it easier to tell where its service works and where it doesn’t. Instead of guessing at where its customers will get service — which is what other carriers do, the company claims — it’s asking people to verify its predictions so it can be more honest with consumers. [Source: T-Mobile]